by John Barlow
“Investigative journalist,” he says, “only known her a few days.” He opens his eyes wide, as if he’s scared. “But the sex is boom-boom!”
Jets of frothy beer shoot from her nostrils.
“Bloody idiot!” she says, wiping her face and inspecting the front of her t-shirt for beer. “Why is she in Leeds, I mean.”
“She’s writing something about Dad. She got in contact with me. We met, had a drink, y’know.”
“Oh, I know you, Mr Ray… But, your dad? Really?”
“Why not?”
She pulls out a smartphone.
“How about you start thinking with your brain instead of your cock. Jeanette Cormac’s the name, yes?”
Thirty seconds later she’s reading from the screen.
“By-lines on some impressive cases, mainly organised crime and politics.” She thumbs down the list, already shaking her head. “High-end stuff. Contemporary. Your dad? Nah. He was interesting in the ’80s. Not now. These days she interviews people like Bernard Sheenan.” She holds up the phone. “Ten days ago. Right before he was murdered. Funny, that.”
The gumbo arrives, steaming in two enormous bowls.
“God, I haven’t had this for a while,” he says, glad to put all thoughts of Bernard Sheenan out of his mind.
“I’d forgotten, you think with your stomach as well.”
“What?” he says, fork in hand, inhaling deeply as he looks for the perfect place to dig in.
“She’s a heavy duty crime journalist. She’s in your flat, in your family’s business, and you have no idea why. You’re a fool.” She takes up her fork. “It does smell good, doesn’t it!”
He puts the first forkful of gumbo into his mouth. The flood of tastes makes his cheeks sting. For a second he is overwhelmed. This was the first meal they’d had together, a late night bowl of gumbo after a long evening talking, just him and Den, a few days after his brother’s death. The smell of warm blood had still been in his nostrils, the knowledge that nothing would ever be the same.
His phone rings.
“Shit,” he says, chewing fast, twisting about in his chair as he pulls out his phone. “Freddy. I better take it.”
He listens, the occasional ‘yes’, but mostly he listens. A minute later the conversation is over.
“There were no new faces in the Park Lane last night,” he says, flipping the phone shut. “Nothing unusual. But there’s good news.”
“Oh yes?”
“He just saw three police cars outside. Looks like they already know. Saves me a job.”
She nods slowly. “So what’s Freddy doing back at the Park Lane tonight?”
“Said he was on his way to the Grand.”
“The theatre? Freddy?”
“That’s what I thought.”
“What was he going to see?”
“Dunno.”
“Didn’t think to ask? Perhaps you wouldn’t make such a great copper after all.”
He shakes his head, ready to tuck into his gumbo again. “Freddy’s got nothing to do with this.”
She smiles. “Thought you said he was in the frame?”
He pushes his dish away, takes a long swig of beer.
“John?” she says, putting her fork down. “I had a termination.”
He freezes, lets the words sink in. Feels his chest heave, his eyes closing.
“Six months ago,” she whispers. “An abortion. I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do… I wanted to tell you, but…”
She reaches out for his hand.
But it’s not there. It’s in the air, ordering another drink.
PART TWO - SATURDAY
Chapter Twenty
Phone. Door. Voices.
Three sounds, all hurting his ears.
Den?
Someone’s thumping on the door so hard it’s echoing inside his head, deep and dangerous, like the thunder of crashing waves.
Did she come back with him last night?
The phone’s ringing.
He opens an eye, sees the bare wooden floorboards an inch away. His head is half on a cushion crammed between a sofa and the coffee table. He’s still in his shirt and trousers, and his body, sprawled on the floor, is aching and cold.
They’re shouting his name, clear and loud.
Must have crawled off the sofa last night, too tired to get up again. Cold. Very cold now, shivering as the first waves of nausea hit him. No need to look around: there’ll be an empty bottle somewhere close by. The self-disgust is worse than the hangover.
Den?
They’d tried to talk it through last night, awkward and tearful, their food ignored in front of them. But what was there to talk about? Then back home in the car, hardly a word. A brief kiss on the cheek as he dropped her off. He watched as she got out and walked up the drive. She turned, looked back, just for a second.
Now this.
The phone stops ringing. The banging too.
They’re telling him to open the door.
He props himself up on his elbows. Through the three huge windows he sees the sky, flecked with ribbons of white cloud that catch the sun. Sometimes, on days like this, the early morning clouds have a blush of yellow from the sun’s first rays. But not today.
The banging starts again.
He squeezes his eyes together, takes a breath, then pushes himself up off the floor, doing what for a haggard, hungover forty-five-year-old is a pretty decent attempt at springing to his feet.
He opens the door.
“Mr John Ray?”
Pale face, drab suit. Copper.
John nods. He knows the face. Detective Sergeant John Steele, sarcastic bastard, reckons himself a bit of a wit. A wit with a warrant card? Bad combo.
“Can we come in?” Steele says, all deference now the door’s finally open. Behind Steele are a couple of uniforms, big fat blokes, faces like Spam. They’re on the tail end of a night shift. Friday night, the worst. Now all they want is their eggs and bacon. Not this shit.
John turns, padding wearily over to the kitchen area to make coffee.
“No need for that,” Steele says, standing just inside the door, “you’ll be needing your jacket, though.”
“Eh?” says John, patting his pockets, then pulling open a drawer, desperate for a fag.
“Jacket. It’s on the floor.”
“What’s this about?”
Steele folds his arms, his face straining to keep the satisfaction in check.
It’s been a year, but he hasn’t forgotten John Ray. There was something dodgy with those sports cars, the whole thing stank. They couldn’t prove anything though. Let it go, they’d been told, we’ve got the convictions we need. So John Ray got off scot-free. Steele knew it, Baron too, and neither of them could do a thing about it.
“John Ray, I am arresting you for the murder of Roberto Swales. You do not have to say anything, but anything you do…”
John looks up to the ceiling, runs his hands through his untidy black hair, and groans.
*
There’s a plastic cup on the table in front of him, its contents too hot to drink. His mouth is dry. They’d let him use the toilet, and he managed to gulp down a few mouthfuls of tepid water from the sink. But now he’s thirsty again.
Opposite him is DI Steven Baron, short-cropped hair, one of those light blue suits he wears, cut a little too tight, almost a uniform, no room to move. So far he’s been polite, friendly even. But that’s just his way. The two men know each other well enough, and their relationship is not forged on friendliness.
Next to Baron sits DS John Steele, proud owner of the city’s most punchable face. Pinky and Perky. Christ, this is a bloody joke. Only it’s not.
Baron speaks towards the digital recorder at the end of the table.
“I ask you again, Mr Ray, would you like to have your legal counsel present before the interview begins? If you prefer, we can provide legal representation for you.”
John stares into the space in front of hi
m, says nothing. This is bullshit. It’s just Baron making a point, a bit of revenge for all that stuff last year. John was lucky there, and he knows it. But going after him for Roberto’s murder? No way. This is Baron’s little game.
“I don’t want a solicitor,” he says in the end, as if it hardly matters one way or the other.
Baron sits back, tries to stifle a yawn, but it creeps out of him just the same.
“Late night?” John asks.
“All night,” Baron says. “We never stop in this place. And you?”
“Last night? I was home by eleven. On my own.”
“And where had you been?”
You don’t want to know, Inspector. I was out with your ex-lover. The woman you sacrificed your marriage for.
“Dinner with a friend. Caribbean Kitchen, up on Roundhay Road.”
Baron nods.
“Well, DS Steele and I have been up all night trying to find the killer of Roberto Swales, who was an old family friend of the Rays, I believe.”
He places a large glossy photograph on the table. John’s stomach lurches. He manages to keep down the bile, but only just. The photo is of a man’s back, the torso blackened down one side, as if it’s been burned. A tattoo extends right across the back: two boxers in action, classic pose, gloves held out in front of them, heads up, Queensbury rules. Surrounding the image is a wreath, and at the bottom: ABAE 1972 M-W FINAL.
He hasn’t seen it for thirty years, more. Roberto used to take him and Joe swimming when they were kids, the open-air pool at Ilkley. Everyone’d stare at the tattoo, then look quickly away. In those days only thugs and nutcases had tats, especially ones like that.
“Thing is,” Baron says, his hands flat on the table, one on each side of the photo, as if he’s admiring it, “the Amateur Boxing Association of England didn’t have a middle-weight final in ’72. Bloke called Henderson won by default.”
“I know,” John says. “He was crap. Turned pro, lost five of his first seven. Retired with a detached retina.”
Baron nods. “The other finalist was remanded for armed robbery just before the final, never got to fight. His name? Roberto Swales.”
John’s hardly listening. He’s back in the Lido at Ilkley, hot summer days as a kid. The other children in the pool would shy away from the big muscle-bound man with the tattooed back. Their mothers’d shy away too. But over the course of the afternoon people would warm to him, to his strange, cock-sure voice and the way he had of making sure you were all right when you swallowed too much water or stubbed your toe. Come teatime Roberto would be refereeing games of water-tag, or teaching children how to dive, their mothers looking on benignly. Or not so benignly; he was a good-looking guy in those days.
“Friend of yours, wasn’t he?” Baron says.
“When I was a lad, aye.”
“Seen Mr Swales recently?”
“Last time I saw Rob alive was a year ago.”
“And dead.”
John looks straight at Baron. Who’ll blink first? The silence in the room hangs over them like a heavy blanket, and neither man speaks.
It takes a discreet cough from Steele to get things moving again.
“Why don’t I tell you?” Baron says. “You saw him yesterday morning at seven a.m. There’s CCTV of you turning down towards the Park Lane, and you pull out onto Vicar Lane forty minutes later. Oh, and you’ve got a speeding ticket from a camera on the Ring Road, ten to seven. See? Up all night, we’ve been. Now, let’s start again, shall we?”
John picks up the coffee. Takes a sip. It’s scalding but at least there’s sugar in it. Another sip, desperate to get something into his stomach. He lets the silence run on again. Think, John: if you lie now, there’ll be more lies down the road. Baron’s not the enemy here.
He puts the coffee in front of him.
“They asked me to go down there yesterday morning, when they found him, see if I could find anything out.”
He feels like he’s going to be sick. The hangover, Den, the thought of Roberto slumped forward in the chair, head caved in… He looks around for a bin, can’t see one. A second later, the nausea recedes, but not completely.
“Private eye, are you?”
“I sorted something out for Lanny Bride last year, if you remember. When his daughter was murdered.”
Steele snorts with derision.
“We’d’ve got to him sooner if it weren’t for your meddling.”
John doesn’t take the bait. “Well, we’ll never know that for sure, will we?”
“What we do know,” Steele says, “is you go running to Lanny every time he clicks his fingers, like a trained poodle. That kind of stuff doesn’t sit too well with a jury.”
Baron inclines his head a touch. Steele shuts up.
“So,” the Inspector says, “you get a call from Lanny and you race down there to sort the mess out?”
“Not Lanny. Someone else.”
“Name?”
John says nothing.
“You haven’t spoken to Lanny, then?”
“Nope.” John holds up his iPhone. “Check.”
“We’ve just been down to the Park Lane,” Baron says. “Already got new floorboards at the back, new carpet, the works. All in vain, because they didn’t dispose of the body properly. Very poorly done.”
“It’s a dying art, dumping bodies,” Steele chips in.
John’s not having any of it. Steele thinks he’s gonna wind him up? He ignores the comment, keeps his head turned to Baron. Pay Steele not attention, that’ll rile him.
“Tell us what you know,” Baron says, as if the preliminaries are over, the pecking order established.
John doesn’t give a toss about pecking orders. He could peck these two to bits without breaking a sweat. That’s why they hate him, plus the fact that he’s Tony Ray’s son. But that’s all in the past, and at the moment John needs to get something out of his system, the plain, gut-churning horror of seeing violent death for a second time in his life. First his brother, now Roberto. Two deaths he’ll never get over, not entirely. Three, if you count his own unborn child, the one he never got to see.
He’s hardly got the strength to lie. So he tells Baron what he found when he walked into the wine bar. The flat, metallic smell that hung on the air, Rob’s heavy body sagging in the chair, the bullets to the leg and arms, the glistening pools of blood that had collected on the top of his crumpled head. He tells them how he vomited in the toilet, had a cigarette out the back. Everything. Almost.
“There was wine soaked into his clothes,” Baron says. “Did you notice that?”
John hasn’t mentioned the champagne. Doesn’t know why, perhaps wary of hearing some quip from Steele about the high life. But as for the rest, he’s told them the truth, and in doing so he’s got over the worst of it. The death of Roberto has been sent to another part of his mind, boxed up and nailed shut, the place where his childhood memories are stored. As for his own aborted child, that was done for him, its memory boxed up before he knew anything about it. Can he complain? Not really, not after what he did to Den.
He blows on his coffee, still hot but drinkable, and wipes a cuff across his mouth. Three long breaths. And then he’s had enough. Enough mourning. Time to sort this out. If Baron and his sidekick want to have a go too, that’s fine. He’ll tell them what they need to now. Within reason.
“Wine?” Baron says again.
“From the bottle,” John says. “I guess they used a bottle, y’know, on his head. The bottle must’ve smashed.”
“Eventually,” Steele adds, still trying to niggle John. “Took a bit of a pummelling.”
“If I took a bottle to your head, it’d crack in the end, however thick the skull is.”
Even Baron can’t resist a wry smile at that one.
Steele isn’t laughing, though.
“A bloke’s been tortured and beaten to death,” he says, “and you’re cracking jokes about caving in people’s heads with champagne bottles?”
> “It wasn’t a joke. Just an observation. I could cave your head in.”
“Playing the hard man, Johnny boy?”
Baron ignores Steele. “There was something about the Park Lane today,” he says, waving his fingers in the air slightly, as if to aid his memory. “It was different, somehow. I’ve been in there a couple of times. I remember a lot of single malts behind the bar, quite an impressive collection. The whiskies were still there this morning. But something had changed, the bar didn’t feel as warm, didn’t have the same glow, that touch of luxury. Can’t for the life of me think what it was, only that it wasn’t there today. It looked empty. Any ideas?”
Baron’s talking about the champagne cabinet, a chiller unit made of cut glass and a gold frame, backlit for effect. It had been smashed yesterday morning when John arrived. Lanny’s men must have taken it out and got rid of it, along with Roberto.
“Nope,” he says. “I don’t go in there as a rule. Not my scene.”
“Not your scene…” Steele says to himself, looking down at the floor, nodding slowly to himself.
“Here,” John says, taking a bunch of keys and a fat wallet from his pocket. “These are Rob’s. He had a flat in the Riverside Tower, behind the station.”
“We’ve already been,” Baron says.
“Why did you take these things?” says Steele. “It’s an offence, y’know.”
John is about to reply to Steele when he realises that he’s still got the cork, the one he picked up from the floor in front of Roberto. He’s under caution for murder, sitting in an interview room in Millgarth, and he’s got the blood-stained cork in his pocket. It almost makes him laugh, although he can feel the sweat on his forehead.
Baron purses his lips and squeezes his eyes together hard.
“You took the keys and wallet from his dead body, having just vomited at the sight of him?”
“They were behind the bar.”
“Where, exactly?”
They’d been in Roberto’s back pockets. The men there had need to rock his big lolloping body forwards to get at them.
“They were just there, on the bar.”
“And how did you know the keys were his?”
“Who else was gonna leave their keys there?”